


side of the highway

by arghmuffin



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Azula and Zuko have a good sibling relationship in this house, Best Friends/Neighbors AU, F/M, Humor, Pining, a bit of a zuko character study perhaps, a bit of angst, because who is Zuko without angst, lots of swearing, much hilarity?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29985789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arghmuffin/pseuds/arghmuffin
Summary: “Why the fuck,” Katara asked, “were you making an omelette at three in the afternoon.”—Zuko moves, tries to repair his relationship with his sister, almost burns the house down, and falls in love. It’s a grand time.
Relationships: Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 142





	side of the highway

**Author's Note:**

> hello! this is different from my usual style yet somehow the longest thing i’ve ever written and the fastest too. in fact i wrote this in a day and a half for no reason at all. i adored writing it so i hope you like reading it!
> 
> warning: incessant abuse of em dashes ahead. oh and lots of swearing, a mention of drinking.

/

**two: whatever you’re doing, stop**

/

 _Click._ “Hello?”

“Katara,” Zuko said, slightly panicked. “I think the house is going to burn down.”

Silence reigned the other end. He heard a few bangs, some shuffling, and a muffled noise before she came back. “I don’t see any smoke, idiot.”

“No, no. I tried to make an omelette and the stove’s on fire? Fuck, I don’t know how to use a stove—”

“Tui and La, Zuko, what the fuck—” he heard her accidentally drop the phone, and despite it all tried not to laugh. “Listen, I’m coming over. For the love of seaprunes, _do not touch anything on or near the stove.”_

“... I don’t even like seaprunes,” he mumbled indignantly, but she’d already hung up.

/

For the longest time since he had moved here, Katara hated him.

He still wasn’t entirely sure why, but there was a lot of tripping involved, spilled liquids, chases across town, and angry yelling before they were people that didn’t hate each other, but didn’t exactly like each other either. And then they were friends, and then best friends, and now look at them; standing in his uncle’s house, coughing their lungs out, grey smoke blanketed around them like fog.

“Why the fuck,” Katara asked, “were you making an omelette at three in the afternoon.”

“I was hungry,” Zuko protested, “and there was an egg in the fridge, and I thought, why not?”

“It didn’t occur to you that you didn’t know how to operate a stove?” she said, half annoyed and half genuinely wondering. “I don’t even know how you lit a stove on fire, Zuko, that should be impossible.”

“Anything is possible if you set your mind to it,” he answered instinctively, a quote directly from Iroh. She tried very hard not to laugh, and failed.

“Okay, I’ll give you that,” Katara conceded, trying in vain to bat away the hazy cloud that had reached her face. Zuko straightened suddenly in realization.

“Agni, I forgot the cheese,” he said out loud. She gaped at him in astonishment.

 _“That’s_ what you’re thinking about right now?”

“You can’t make an omelette without cheese, Katara, it’s basic science—”

“And you’re just going to ignore the fact that you set your uncle’s stove on fire, I see—”

They argued for several minutes before the burnt omelette, forgotten in the midst of the moment, fell from its precarious perch on the pan and landed on the floor, abruptly forcing them to stop.

A few moments passed. The sound of violent coughing was heard several times before Katara sighed.

“Shame about the egg,” she said mournfully, and he silently agreed.

/ 

_katara: i just finished debate and sokka’s being an idiot_

_katara: can you come pick me up_

_zuko: fine. where_

_katara: … school, dumbass_

/

“I’m going to murder Jet,” Katara grumbled as she slid into the car.

Zuko stifled a laugh. “What is it this time?”

“Fucking asshole tried to counteract every point I’ve ever argued in my life. Unsuccessfully, might I add.”

He laughed for real this time. “Just remember I always believed in your abilities, Katara, no matter what anyone else said.”

“Jackass!” she yelled, offended, but the image was ruined by her grin. “I should have you thrown out for that comment.”

“Hey, I own this car!”

“Just think how easy it would be to pick you up and chuck you out the window, like holding a toddler, you’re so small—”

“Oh fuck you, I’m like a foot taller than you—”

If they swerved slightly on the road, none of them noticed, just continued bickering, the car going slightly past the speed limit and nowhere at the same time.

/

There was something so different about Ba Sing Se than Caldera City, although Zuko could never pinpoint quite exactly what. 

As a child, he’d spent most of his free time in the garden with his mother. Sometimes Azula dragged him along to play with her friends, and they would spend hours in the sun, the heat slowly baking them alive, that familiar feeling: _it’s sundown but I don’t want to go home yet. Azula pushed me, Mom, it isn’t fair, where’s the ball, hey that’s not allowed—!_ when the world revolved around turtleducks and yard games, blinking when Azula cheated at four-square, laying down in the grass, the condensation of a cold drink wetting his hand.

Now, well. He doesn’t know about now, except that he works at his uncle’s tea shop on the weekends, spends his afternoons with Katara and their group of friends, groans over piles of calculus homework and fails miserably at parallel parking.

It’s a different type of living, all stick-shift instead of bubble wand, melting under something other than the sun and knowing when he’s supposed to let go.

/

“Zuko! I’m home!” The door banged open loudly, and he heard a string of curses.

“This isn’t your house,” he replied without looking up from a cursed sheet of chemistry equations. “Go back to the peasant hut where you belong.”

“I brought a gift for you, you fucking ungrateful termite-beetle, I guess I’ll just eat it myself—”

He glanced up at lightning speed. “Never mind you’re very welcome here, what is it?”

Katara smirked. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” The bag in her hand slipped open to reveal a glass container, a blob of yellow laying distorted behind the lid. “It’s an omelette, since apparently you can’t make one without spending thousands of dollars on house repairs.”

“Hey, yes I can,” he argued, even as he lifted it out of the bag gratefully. “But as payment, I guess you can stay.”

She snorted. “As if you’d kick me out. I see right through you, Zuko.”

He almost stopped in the middle of taking the omelette out, as if thinking about her was a pause button, the way she glanced over at him during car rides, smiled at him like they shared a secret, just the two of them. She started talking about a girl on the swim team she’d just met, and he grinned at her dramatic hand movements, her exasperated tone.

 _I see right through you, Zuko._ Maybe she did. Or maybe he was just being sentimental as fuck, as she stuck her feet into his unwilling lap, stealthily stealing the remote out of his hand to change the channel.

/

If there was one thing Zuko missed while moving here, it was, surprisingly, Azula. 

They had never had the best sibling relationship, especially back then, when they were still living with Ozai and being constantly pitted against each other. She had always felt he was nothing more than competition, and he resented her for always winning. It took a few years, and a lot of changes, before they were something other than opponents to each other. Including, well, moving hundreds of miles away.

Zuko lay on his bed, the heat of early fall making it slightly uncomfortable, blankly staring up above.

“How’s school?” he asked her quietly.

“It’s going fine. You?”

“Everything’s good here.” He twisted his sheets around with his fingers, trying to see the mottled pattern of his ceiling in the dark. “How are Mai and Ty Lee?”

“Same as ever. Ty Lee had an acrobat performance the other day,” she snorted, but he could hear the fond exasperation hidden in the layers of her voice. “She made me go watch.”

He hummed in sympathy. There was a moment of silence, and he wondered what to say, if he would ever be brave enough to do it out loud: _what if we were like Katara and Sokka? What if Dad didn't do the things he did? What if we grew up differently? What then?_

There was a faint crackling sound, a muffled _Okay, coming_ before Azula pulled the phone back.

“Alright, I have to go,” she told him. “Bye, Zuko.”

 _I love you,_ he almost said. 

“Talk to you later, Azula.” She hung up. 

He stared at his ceiling the entire night, the realization that they might never have a normal relationship dawning on him very suddenly. But they were trying. That must’ve counted for something.

/

“What are you thinking about?” she prodded his back with her finger, sharply. He hissed.

“Ow, Katara, that hurt like hell I’m suing—”

“What, your genes for your low pain tolerance?”

“— maybe then you can compensate for all the anguish you’ve caused me over the years—”

That was how it usually went, them lying on her bedroom floor, devouring chips that had probably expired a few months ago and pretending like there was nothing foreign lurking outside the confines of her walls; the real world, maybe. It was just them.

/

_katara: sokka has lost his mind_

_zuko: finally_

_katara: this is a serious matter. where’s suki she’s the only one who can fix this_

_zuko: what happened_

_katara: he went rabid and somehow got himself stuck in a hole. now he’s swearing off meat and sarcasm and everyone is laughing at him_

_zuko: sounds like a him problem_

_katara: truer words have never come out of your mouth_

_—_

_katara: … oh wait never mind toph pulled him out somehow_

_zuko: what a fucking shame._

/

A slight gasp of breath. _“Ommmmm.”_

“What the hell, are you meditating?” he asked in disbelief, letting out a laugh.

Katara cracked an eye open, unbothered. “Isn’t this what you like to do every morning? Uncle taught me.”

His heart skipped a beat at the fact that she called him Uncle. Or maybe it was the fact that she had lit a candle, given up meditating and was now watching it with interest, the same way Azula had eyed a lighter when they were kids and promptly set the curtain on fire.

“Well, you’re not very good at it,” he grunted, and bent down to blow the candle out. She sighed with impatience.

“What do you want?”

“Toph told me to tell you she wanted to write something to her parents,” he said, a bit more carefully, and she stood up in curiosity.

“Oh, okay, see you later,” Katara told him quickly, breezing out the doorway like she had never been there. And for a second, it felt like she hadn’t, but the candle was still on the ground, his red lighter sitting wayward beside it.

/

**one: oh, fuck it**

/

“Why am I here,” he muttered under his breath. “Why the hell am I here.”

Azula, unfortunately, heard him. “I’m not sure either, Zuzu,” she replied airily. He must’ve been dreaming when he heard a hint of uncertainty in her voice. “Why do you feel the need to go all the way to Ba Sing Se? Are you really that scared of me?”

“You’re a nuisance,” he replied, annoyed. “An absolute nuisance. Ty Lee’s family is going to get tired of you the second you move in.”

“Meanwhile they’ve already tired of you,” she sneered. Someone bumped into him, jostling his suitcase. They were miles ahead by the time he turned around.

A few moments passed before she sighed. “When’s Uncle supposed to be here again?” she asked, irritated.

“Soon, I guess.” The airport was alive around them, people running to their flights, tacky souvenir stores jammed to the walls. He glanced around nervously. 

Another pause. “You’ll be okay by yourself?” he asked quietly, risking a glance at her. Surprisingly, she looked a bit caught off-guard, unarmed.

“Of course,” the usual Azula was back on, a full scoff marring her features. “I won’t be alone, anyway.”

When Uncle came, laden with heavy suitcases that smelled suspiciously of tea, she said her goodbyes, and turned around. There really was nothing left to say.

/

The first person he met in Ba Sing Se was Aang. Which turned out to be somewhat of a bad thing.

“Hi, I’m Aang,” he introduced himself cheerfully, and Zuko would soon realize that, infuriatingly, he was like this at all hours of the day. “And I live with my grandpa Gyatso over there.”

Later, he would look back on this moment and realize just how disastrous it was. Like something out of a history book, except instead of generals and kings it’s him and a bald kid in Ba Sing Se suburbs.

 _“Gyatso?_ The founder of Avatar?” There was probably smoke out of his nostrils at this point. Honestly, he couldn’t remember.

Aang’s smile dimmed. “Um, yes?”

“Holy fuck.” Zuko brushed roughly past him, the memory of a meeting room printed on the front of his brain, his younger self’s insistence on fair negotiations, the smell of burning. “Get out of my way. I want nothing to do with you.”

And this, he believed, is what jump-started everything.

/

“Tui, I hate you!” Katara yelled at him, her face redder than the Fire Nation flag. “You’re a self-absorbed, angry prickass with absolutely zero concern for others!”

He wasn’t much better. “Oh, as if you’re an angel,” he sneered, and another subject for argument had suddenly surfaced.

This was an extremely common occurrence. Almost to the point of concern, but they kept fighting, finding a reason to one up each other, always the competition. There could never be a moment of peace as long as the two coexisted. It was written.

“Hey, maybe the both of you need to calm down—” Sokka attempted, his hands raised in the effort.

Katara and Zuko turned at the same time. “Shut up, asshole,” they said in unison.

/

He spent his mother’s birthday looking at the ceiling. There was a small, yellow stain at the top left corner, from his point of view. It wasn’t particularly interesting or anything, but he stared at it for a solid few minutes.

“Zuko?” A few knocks sounded, before the door swung open. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Go away, Uncle.” His voice came out gruffer than he thought it would be. A few seconds passed before he heard a sigh, and the door swing shut.

It was four in the afternoon. He didn’t particularly care, and tried to go to sleep, his brain plagued with turtleduck ponds, the scent of his mother’s perfume, the way she hugged him when he scraped his knee. He tried not to think of these things and ended up thinking of them more.

When he couldn’t go to sleep, he considered calling Azula. He wasn’t sure if she missed their mother. But he really thought she did, and maybe she was capable of love too, despite it all.

In the end, he pulled out his phone, put it back in his pocket again. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. When he finally got out of bed, he noticed a cup of tea on his dresser.

 _Crazy old man,_ he thought fondly, and took a sip. Suddenly his mother was beside him, showing him how to hold the cup correctly, everything seeming as real as the cool ginseng slipping down his throat.

/

Katara was the first person he told about his scar to. Which made sense in hindsight, but not really in the moment, as she was the only person who still hated him.

“Holy fuck,” she responded, eyes glistening, and he squirmed uncomfortably at the sight of tears. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he told her quickly, “It’s not your fault. Obviously.”

“Well, yeah, but…” she trailed off, looking into the distance. And then told him about what happened to her mother, touching the necklace she wore every day he’d ever known her, her voice thick. There was something about grief that never really went away, just made itself easier to wear.

Maybe that was the moment that really cemented their friendship, even though they only became acquaintances then. Because they knew what really knowing each other felt like. It felt kind of good.

/

In the end, it was a bottle of whiskey that really undid them. A highly symbolic affair, Katara would claim later, but what it was supposed to mean no one would ever know.

“We’re not supposed to be drinking this,” she stage-whispered into his ear, hiccuping slightly. Sokka was vomiting into a bush in his peripheral, Suki patting his back absently.

“All the more reason to do it.” He laughed for a minute. “Where am I again?”

“Katara and Sokka’s backyard,” Aang replied, one of the only two sober ones. He was supposed to babysit and make sure they didn’t do anything too stupid, but was failing miserably at his job.

“That looks fun,” Toph said, eyeing his shot glass with interest. “Say, Zuko, can I have some?”

“You’re too young, Toph,” Suki piped up from her position on the ground. “Is that why we didn’t let her drink? I think it might’ve been something about her wearing green—”

“Zuko’s wearing green,” Katara said clumsily, pulling up weeds by the fist. “Wow, he’s funnier when he’s drunk.”

“Hey!” He mustered the indignance to reply. “I’m funny at all levels of sobriety.”

At this point, Sokka reemerged from his pit of despair. “I hate all of you,” he declared. “Except for Suki. None of you have any sympathy whatsoever.”

Several protests were heard around the backyard.

“Fuck you, now I don’t!” Toph cried, and Katara’s head shot up.

“Oh no, Toph, _don’t curse,_ you’re too young—”

Suki crawled over to the second bush, next to Sokka’s, and threw up.

“Oh, hell—”

By morning, Katara was dropping her head on his shoulder to block out the light, Suki and Sokka groaning miserably in the other corner of her living room. 

There were some things you couldn’t go through without becoming best friends; vomiting together was probably one of them.

/

_zuko: hey, azula_

_Azula: What, Zuzu?_

_zuko: how’s school?_

_Azula: That’s a stupid question. Obviously, it’s going fine._

/

“Love Amongst the Dragons?” Katara asked him incredulously. “Tui and La, you’re a nerd and I didn’t even know it.”

His face burned in embarrassment. “Shut up, _shut up,_ ” he told her furiously. “You cannot speak another word from this moment on.”

Katara laughed for a full minute. And then two, three, maybe ten. “This is prime blackmail material,” she told him delightedly.

“Ha. As if you’d have anyone to tell it to besides me, social recluse.”

“Hey!” She squawked in offense. “I have more friends than you, asshat.”

“Oh, sorry, I forgot to pretend they were real—”

“I hate you.” She shoved him into the nearby lamppost. He pushed her into a brick wall.

“You’re a fuckhead, you know that?” she asked him, and he hummed in confirmation.

“Never pretended to be anything else. Honestly, that was a stupid move on your part.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “It really was, wasn’t it.”

/

By the end of the first month, he knew more about Katara than he’d ever want to. Such as:

She climbed ladders with no fear. 

She could play one (1) song on the Tsungi horn.

There was hardly anything she liked more than a nice bowl of stewed seaprunes, including him.

And lastly, she was his best friend because of whatever fucking reason the universe had thrown them together.

Zuko told her all of this. Katara had the audacity to laugh.

“That’s a shit list,” she replied, grinning like a madman. “But honest.”

He scoffed. “Of course it’s honest,” he said. “Have you ever known me to be unhonest?”

“You are painfully honest,” Katara told him, in a painfully honest way. “Extremely so.”

He was about to respond when Sokka appeared in the doorway, Aang’s cat Momo cradled in his arms.

“It’s Momo’s half birthday today,” he declared, petting said cat. “We’re throwing a party. Come or don’t.” And just as abruptly as he came, he left.

“How could I have forgotten,” Katara gasped, half serious. “C’mon, Zuko, it’s Momo’s half birthday.” She tugged him up by his arm and dragged him to the kitchen, where a single can of cat food sat on the dining table.

“This is the weirdest, shittiest party I’ve ever been to,” Zuko announced, but he was drowned out by a slow rendition of the _Happy Birthday_ song.

Afterwards, everyone gave their well wishes and a few pets to the center of the party. Katara coddled him for a good twenty minutes, slowly feeding him his birthday treat.

Zuko struggled not to laugh, and added this fact about her to his list: she adored Momo. More than, in her own words, “anyone else that has ever existed. Including you, Zuko.”

/

**three: no one really cares**

/

It only took a year and half before Zuko realized that he, too, adored something more than anyone else that had ever existed. The only problem was that she was his best friend, and not a cat.

He didn’t know what to do with this information. So naturally, he went over to Katara’s, because even when she was the problem, she was the solution.

“Fuck off,” she grunted, waving an extremely threatening, empty hand at him. “Go find someone else to bother.”

“It’s noon,” he responded flatly. “Wake up.”

She rolled ungracefully out of bed. “Just because you get up at the asscrack of dawn doesn’t mean everyone else has to,” she grumbled, and he resisted the urge to tell her she was being extremely, unfairly endearing. Instead, he made a noise of disagreement.

“I ate lunch two minutes ago, Katara,” he said, trying not to smile. It was in vain. “Come on.”

“Fuck you, I’m up, I’m up.”

Ten minutes later she sat at the kitchen table, irritatedly sipping a cup of coffee and eating a so-called “brunch”.

“It’s a thing,” she protested, combing her fingers through her knotted hair. 

“Why the hell would you ever mash two meals up together,” he asked very seriously. She shrugged.

“I dunno. More coffee, please.” And like the lovesick idiot he was, he got up and poured it for her. She looked on in surprise for a second.

“Huh, it actually worked.” Katara looked unnaturally pleased with herself. “Soon enough, I’ll have a personal butler, and it’ll be you. Mark my words.”

“Agni, to hell with you, I’ve never doing anything nice for you again—”

“I’m being serious, give it a month or two and _bam—_ ”

He spent another few minutes arguing with her, as per their usual routine. She finished her unholy meal, and flipped him off before going upstairs to change. _Maybe it really is working,_ he thought curiously, because after ten minutes of talking butlerly logistics, he could hardly think of why he liked her at all. She was a true menace.

“Alright, I’m ready,” she said from the top of the staircase, and purely by law of existence, he remembered why he was in love with her again. 

_Fuck._ He was completely and utterly fucked.

/

“There’s no shame in admitting when you’ve lost,” Katara told him, her eyes glinting mischievously in the sun.

“I haven’t lost,” he retorted fruitlessly, because she cackled anyway. “There are no winners and losers in the art of seagull-feeding. It is purely an activity to enjoy.”

“Of course.” She did not sound entirely convinced. “It’s alright. Chronic denier or not, I love you all the same.”

She sat cheerfully beside him, the area around her nose slightly sunburnt, and he tried very hard not to kiss her or tell her he loved her too. Katara would never know the way he meant it, anyway.

/

Whenever he went to Lake Laogai, the largest body of water in Ba Sing Se, all he could think about was how strange it was compared to the beaches in Caldera. Laogai was stone and reeds, all artificial; Caldera beaches were sand and ocean and the cold burn of popsicles in your mouth, the way you’d look down in the water and see a crab-fish walking straight towards you.

He thought about going back sometimes. He thought about seeing Azula, living back in the old house, going to his old private school and going to the beach on the weekends. It didn’t all sound terrible, to be quite honest, just incredibly strange, even entertaining the thought.

There wasn’t a lot for him there. But in Ba Sing Se— Uncle and his friends, the way Toph snorted until she almost fell off her chair, how Katara bit her lip when she was concentrating, the smell of street food and visiting the Lower Ring just because— it felt real, tangible, like something he could touch and not shatter.

“Are you ever going to come back?” Azula asked him once, quietly, barely there. 

He was almost afraid to answer. “Maybe,” he replied, his voice distant and far away. “Maybe to visit.”

It wasn’t like Azula to understand him often, but she understood that, the not really wanting to return.

So there he stood, alone in Lake Laogai, his toes digging into the marsh, wondering if he’d ever learn to love it like the beach. It was hard to believe that two years ago, he was swimming in an ocean very far away, the happiest thing he knew in the breath he took when he surfaced.

/

There was a rainstorm for a couple of days. Katara absolutely loved it.

“Zuko, come dance with me,” she said to him loudly, laughing like it was the best thing she’d ever done. His breath caught in his throat.

“The things I do for you,” he grumbled quite honestly, and stepped outside only to get soaked immediately. “How do you even enjoy this?”

“It’s _rain,_ Zuko,” she responded, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips. She said it like it was something obvious, something you couldn’t not love however hard you tried. He felt that way about her sometimes.

“That makes everything so much clearer,” he rolled his eyes in fond exasperation. “Alright, fine, I’ll dance with you.”

/

_katara: hey can you pick up toph too_

_katara: she’s terrorizing the seniors again_

_zuko: fine. only because i feel bad for them_

_katara: okay_

_—_

_katara: what a nice lil family we are_

_zuko: No._

/

“This is indeed a miserable existence,” Katara declared at the sky when the clouds broke and proceeded to blind her.

“Only you would say that when it stopped raining,” he snorted, and looked over to find her squinting in the sunlight.

“It burns,” she complained dramatically.

“Then stop looking, dumbass.”

She scowled deeply at him. “Fuck _off,_ I’m trying to have my moment, can you leave me alone for one second—”

“You’re my only source of entertainment. Learn to bear the pain.”

“I loathe you.” He smiled sharply. The other people at the park either ignored them or gave them strange looks when they shoved each other.

“Okay, it is kind of pretty outside,” she conceded, after they passed a colorful garden of various flowers. “Mother Nature’s clearly doing something right.”

He gave her an incredulous look. “This is not what I heard a few minutes ago when the sun came out.”

“Well, obviously not the sun, idiot, but the shrubbery looks immaculate—”

He groaned. “No. Shut up. I don’t want to hear any of this discussion anymore.”

“Has the truth addled your brain, Zuko?” 

Twenty minutes later they were back in the car, discussing the possibility of Sokka getting eaten by Aang’s other pet, a giant dog named Appa.

“I’d said it’s relatively high.”

“Off the charts, really.”

And it was stupid, but he really wanted to reach over and touch her then, grinning easily, the wind through their hair, driving slow circles in the parking lot secretly because it made her laugh. All of sudden, he didn’t want to close his eyes and have her disappear. He didn’t want to miss out on her.

/

“You owe Momo an apology,” Katara told him sternly. “What you said was incredibly hurtful and I won’t stand for it.”

“What the fuck.” Zuko said. But one look at Katara made him sigh and turn to the cat in her arms. “I’m sorry I called you a lazy animal dependent on our free handouts. After you scratched me.”

“There you go. Wasn’t so hard, was it?” she shifted the lazy animal dependent on free handouts in her arms. Was it so bad to be jealous of a cat?

“I can’t believe you’re taking his side. Look at this scratch!”

“It’s like a paper cut,” she waved dismissively, conveniently ignoring the length of the red line on his arm. “Momo loves you and it was an accident.”

“One day he’s going to murder someone somehow, and you’re going to be the only one to cover for him, and you’re going to be shit at it and go to jail—”

“Are you fucking joking, I’d be so good at covering up murders—”

“SHUT UP,” someone yelled from upstairs. It sounded extraordinarily like Sokka. “SHUT THE FUCK UP, IT’S FIVE IN THE MORNING, GO TO SLEEP.”

“He’s no fun,” Katara scowled. “He’s just salty he wasn’t a part of our all-nighter.”

Zuko nodded in agreement. 

“I think we’re out of coffee, by the way.”

“Tui and La, are you serious? I need that to survive, we have to get more _now!”_

“Who even goes to the store at five am, Katara—”

Apparently they did, but almost everywhere was closed except for a nearby gas station that stood on its last legs. They bought old, bitter coffee, so black it looked like it came out of a pentapus-infested sewer.

“This is shit,” she observed, downing a fourth of the cup in one go. He nodded solemnly. “If only you hadn’t antagonized Momo, I wouldn’t have orchestrated an all-nighter to wear you down enough to apologize.”

“What the fuck,” he said for the infinite time that night.

/

“Ty Lee’s been asking me if I want to join her acrobat class,” Azula said, and then laughed sharply. She laughed like everything else she did, quick and deliberate. He wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not.

“I take it you’re not going to go?” He raised an eyebrow, still lying on his back and facing the ceiling. The time difference meant that Azula always called him at night.

“Of course not. It’s not my thing.”

They talked about dumb things, just small talk really, but it warmed him all the same. He was almost ready to fall asleep when she said, quickly, “Good luck with that girl.”

His heart stopped. He could almost see her on the other side of the phone, sitting on one of Ty Lee’s pink beanbags, artfully studying her nails. 

“... What girl?”

“Zuko, I’m not dumb,” she said, a bit of the old Azula slipping back in. He was surprised to find that he did not mind much. “Katara. You’re clearly in love with her.”

He groaned and rolled over in bed. “Is it that obvious?”

“Disgustingly.” She paused. “But like I said, good luck.”

“Thanks, Azula,” he said, his voice a bit hoarse, although he couldn’t imagine why.

/

He didn’t plan it or anything, just looked over at her one day and decided he had to tell her. He blamed Azula and the inner Toph in his head _(just do it, Sparky, are you a coward or not?)._

They were driving a long stretch on the highway and a smarter person might’ve waited until they’d pulled over, but Zuko was not a smarter person. Zuko was the person who blurted out, “I love you,” to his best friend at sixty miles an hour.

Katara, graciously, gave him nothing but a weird look. “I love you too?” she said in suspicion. “Alright, what do you want?”

This very, very nearly ruined the moment. He resisted the urge to protest and took a deep, shaky breath, his heart pounding violently in his ribs.

“No, dumbass,” he said fondly, because he loved her. “I love you.” 

There was an incredibly long pause, in which Zuko seemed to have driven eight highway lengths. Katara’s mouth opened and closed, although he would deny that he saw this because he was supposed to be watching the road.

Then— “You motherfucker,” she said, smiling like she was about to cry, and he really didn’t want her to, but he didn’t know how this was going to go. 

“I love you too.”

And Zuko wanted to kiss her right then and there, but because he was not a smart person, he had wait to pull over the car first.

/

“Do you love me more than Momo now.” He fixed her with an intense gaze.

She laughed. “No. Bitch, you really thought—”

“Agni, I hate you.”

“Azula was right, you really are the worst liar in the world.”

“You talked to _Azula?”_

/

**Author's Note:**

> i hope this was the right vibe. also that i’m not the only one who finds myself funny aadjfjakdlks yes i pulled these out of my ass
> 
> thank you for reading i love you all very much!!! come find me shitposting my life out on [twitter](https://twitter.com/arghmuffin) :)


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